Tag: medication

I am on antidepressants. Escitalopram, 10mg a day. Have been for nearly three years now.

TRIGGER WARNING.

I am about to engage in a discussion that could inadvertently hurt some people. However important the topic at hand – and I do believe it is important – nothing is more important than your own health. If you tend to be triggered by talk of depression, please read at your own discretion.

The first psychiatrist I ever went to told me I had a bad case of the blues.

“You’re still young, you shouldn’t disengage from your life like that.”

I was shaking and unable to talk properly so I just nodded, but deep down I was angry at her. I felt dismissed. I blamed her for not just understanding, for not seeing through my slightly-less-stiff-than-usual upper lip. After all, it was her job to read my mind, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy for someone who hasn’t experienced depression to imagine what it actually does. And that’s totally normal. You shouldn’t be expected to just know. On the flip side, it isn’t easy either for someone currently suffering through it to explain how they feel.

So this is me attempting to communicate some thoughts and feelings, from the easier standpoint of “two and a half years later”. Cue cheesy flashback transition.

It started very suddenly, a little after my landlord passed away. I didn’t know him all that well. He wasn’t a close friend or a family member, and it’s not like I thought about him every day. Yet when he tragically, abruptly, died, something was triggered inside of me.

I started thinking about death every day. Mine. Depression is narcissistic like that. Then I started thinking about death every hour. Then every minute. I had had “the blues” before, but this wasn’t it. This was different. It felt permanent. It felt like I was broken. It involved an endless circle of downs (numb apathy) and even-further-downs (locking myself in the bathroom and crying my eyes out in panic).

Now, you have to understand that my life didn’t suck. Actually, it was quite amazing. But depression isn’t really about all the bad stuff that is going on in your life. It’s more twisted than that. No matter how incredibly fantastic my life might be, depression constantly reminded me that it would still have to end and that all the incredible fantasticness would be lost forever.

In my ill mind, this progression of events:

be born

follow your dreams

get your novels published

find love

be happy

die

… was exactly the same as this one:

be born

die

This is not how a human brain is supposed to work. If it were, then there is a decent chance life would have died out years and years ago.

No.

This is a glitch.

Yet there is a stigma in our society. When I started this post with a “confession”, I wasn’t using the word lightly. For some reason, admitting to being depressed, especially to the point of needing medication to function properly, has become – or maybe it has always been – a confession.

You whisper it, mumble it, beat around the bush. You rationalize it away. “Oh, I’m taking meds for now but I’m going to stop soon.” It has somehow become shameful to take antidepressants.

Don’t get me wrong, if you don’t feel that medication is the right way for you to go about fighting your depression, then I’m certainly not here to tell you you’re wrong. I don’t pretend to know everyone’s experiences, nor do I pretend to be a doctor.

But it seems to me that nobody goes around telling diabetic people to stop shooting themselves full of drugs. When you have a headache, it’s fairly rare for your friends to suggest maybe you shouldn’t take painkillers because then you wouldn’t be yourself anymore.

This is something I have actually been told. I have been told I’m just drugging myself up and that it keeps me from seeing the world as it is.

This is bullshit. Dangerous, radioactive bullshit – go on, take a moment to picture that, I’ll be waiting.

Done?

Okay, seriously though. When you say something like that to a depressed person, you are effectively telling a very vulnerable, sick human being that they will never be happy ever again. Even if you believe that to be true, how sadistic do you have to be to think it’s a good thing to say? It’s not funny or helpful. In fact, it can cause very severe harm.

I wasn’t feeling like myself, and I was deeply unhappy, and now that I take “the drugs”, I’m more able to connect with other people, I feel like myself more often, more easily, and I’m happier. This isn’t to say that the world isn’t absurd and weird and that it’s abnormal to feel alienated by that. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that if you used to be happy and now you’re not, then there’s probably something wrong.

It is not cool or edgy or deep to be miserable.

I take antidepressants for the same reason I take anti-allergy medication. Because otherwise I would be a wheezy, teary-eyed, non-functional mess, unable to accomplish any of the simple tasks of everyday life. Because otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to be myself.